Stiff News (15 page)

‘We don't.'

Sloan ground his teeth. That was something else the Superintendent would not like.

‘At least,' hurried on the Matron, ‘not Mrs McBeath's room. Some, but not hers. She likes to be left undisturbed, so if she's had a bad night, she may sleep on.'

‘So?'

‘So when she didn't appear by coffee-time one of the girls went up to check that she was all right.'

‘And she wasn't there?' Sloan motioned to Detective Constable Crosby to start to get ready for the road.

‘Her room was empty.' The Matron swallowed. ‘And so we don't know whether she's all right or not.'

‘Bed slept in?' If parameters of time could not be got one way, then they would have to be got another – Superintendent Leeyes would pretty soon be playing the blame game if not.

‘Oh, yes, but I'm afraid it's not as simple as that.'

Detective Inspector Sloan had already reached the conclusion that nothing at the Manor was simple any more than it was ordinary. ‘In what way?'

‘Since we've started looking for her several residents have told us they'd seen her pacing up and down in the grounds all morning looking distinctly agitated.'

‘But you can't find her there?' Sloan was on his feet now.

‘Not anywhere,' said Muriel Peden tightly.

*   *   *

‘Well?' demanded Mrs Carruthers, deeply regretting her earlier decision to stay in bed that morning. She had straight away despatched her son downstairs to find out what had been going on in the garden and Ned had now come back to her room. ‘Don't just stand there,' she said as he stayed silent.

‘No, Mummy.'

‘Then tell me who it is they are all looking for out there.'

‘Someone called Mrs McBeath,' Ned said unwillingly. He had positioned himself just inside the bedroom, his back to the door.

‘Mrs McBeath?' His mother sat straight up in her bed. ‘Little Morag McBeath?'

‘You may not know her,' murmured Ned hopefully.

‘Of course I know her.'

‘She's gone missing.'

‘I don't believe it.'

‘I expect she wandered off alone.'

Maisie glared at him. ‘Rubbish!'

‘Probably getting a bit old and all that,' he said awkwardly.

‘She had all her wits yesterday. Nobody could have called her doited then,' she sniffed, ‘which is more than you can say for some folk around here.'

Ned stiffened himself against the back of the door. ‘I'm afraid they can't find her anywhere.'

‘Afraid?' Maisie Carruthers turned her head away and looked towards the window, an unfathomable expression on her face. ‘What do you mean?'

‘That they're very worried that something might have happened to her.'

‘Are you sure?'

He said, ‘It's the police who are worried.'

Mrs Carruthers let her head sink gently downwards on to her chest. Ned couldn't see his mother's face at all now.

‘They've just arrived from Berebury,' he ventured, wondering if Mrs McBeath might have collapsed in the garden. Dying in a garden when his time came was all he ever asked for himself, although he was enough of a professional to know that a garden was as much of a hell's half-acre as anywhere else. ‘It's a good place to go, a garden, if you have to,' he went on lightly.

‘Alone?' she said drily. ‘And afraid?'

‘No, perhaps it's not good to go alone,' he conceded, wondering if this was what she had really meant. ‘But,' he produced his favourite quotation, always very popular with lady garden-lovers of a certain age, ‘“A garden is a lovesome thing. God wot!”' He didn't believe it himself, of course. Plant, insect, rodent and bird carried on their struggles for survival in a garden just as they – and everything else – did everywhere else in the world.

Man, too, sometimes. And woman.

‘How long has she been missing?' his mother asked presently.

‘Since she was seen in the garden this morning.'

‘Ah…' Maisie's expression was quite inscrutable. ‘It's like that, is it?'

‘We've all got to stay in our rooms until they've interviewed everyone.' Ned Carruthers was something of a garden historian as well as a landscape designer but this was not the moment for his celebrated little lecture on the wild man of the garden. The hermit had been in his grotto there to remind the visitor that evil – in the shape of a wild man – lurked at the bottom of the garden, that there was always danger there.

‘Even us?'

Ned nodded. ‘Even us. We've got to stay here until they come.' The lineal descendant of the hermit in his grotto was the fear of seeing something nasty in the woodshed – and quite probably the Mr McGregor who had so frightened Peter Rabbit …

‘I can't tell them anything.'

‘Of course you can't,' he said warmly. ‘You've only just got here. You mustn't worry about it. It's nothing to do with you.'

A frown crossed his mother's forehead. ‘But I don't understand why…'

‘Why what?' He was worried now, she looked suddenly so old and defenceless. Besides, there was ever present the lurking fear that his mother might discharge herself from the Manor – and he knew exactly what his wife, Stella, would say about that, because she had already told him in no uncertain terms.

Several times.

Maisie said, ‘But why Morag McBeath?'

‘I don't understand, Mummy.' He wondered now if it was his mother who was confused. ‘What do you mean?'

‘I can't understand why it should have been Morag McBeath who's gone missing,' she repeated.

‘We don't know why, either,' he said soothingly. ‘But I'm sure they'll tell us all in good time. When she's turned up again.'

She wasn't listening. ‘Because, you see, Charlie McBeath was on the Staff the whole time.'

‘No,' he retorted, ‘I don't see. What has Charlie McBeath got to do with it?'

‘Nothing. That's the point.'

‘He was her husband, I take it?'

‘Yes.'

‘So?'

‘Charlie McBeath never left Alexandria.'

‘What on earth are you talking about, Mummy?'

‘Never you mind.' Maisie Carruthers clamped her edentulous jaws tightly together.

Try as he might, her son couldn't get her to say another word.

*   *   *

As the police car turned into the drive of the Manor at Almstone once again Detective Inspector Sloan saw fit to remark to Detective Constable Crosby, who was at the wheel at the time, that the gravel chippings there had not been laid down for the express purpose of his skidding to a dramatic halt thereon.

‘Of course not, sir.' Crosby sounded injured. He pulled the police car round to the front door as if it had been the carriage and pair that the drive had been designed for and executed a gentle stop worthy of any professional chauffeur.

Mrs Muriel Peden was standing at the front door at the top of the short flight of steps and between two polished granite curling stones. She gave a negative shake of her head as they got out of the car. ‘Not a sign of Mrs McBeath anywhere, I'm afraid, Inspector.'

Sloan cast his eyes round the grounds. The gardens stretched as far as he could see, giving way in a structured artistic recession of shades of green to great parkland trees. He said, ‘We're going to need more than a good eye for country to know where to begin here, Matron.'

‘The Brigadier's insisted on organizing a search party already,' Muriel Peden sighed, opening her hands wide in a gesture of helplessness. ‘I couldn't stop him, Inspector. He's sent poor Captain Markyate to work his way towards the front gates and he's taken the back of the house and the car park himself.'

Sloan nodded. Presumably the Brigadier had a soldier's eye for country. It would, Sloan decided, be different from the police one.

‘And Miss Bentley's checking the kitchen gardens, although what Mrs McBeath would be doing there and how Miss Bentley'll manage with her stick I don't know.'

‘Crosby can go and see,' suggested Sloan, ‘can't you, Crosby?'

‘Yes, sir,' he said, obediently peeling off in the direction of the kitchen.

‘It's all very well for you, Constable,' said Lisa Haines, encountering Crosby on his way to the kitchen door, ‘but, missing persons or not, people have got to eat.'

The King might be in this counting house counting out his money and the Queen in the parlour eating bread and honey but –
mutatis mutandis
– any upset still found the cook in the kitchen making apple crumble in quantity.

‘It's a missing person all right,' said Crosby, adding importantly, ‘We're very worried about her.'

‘It's chicken pie…'

‘Leftovers from yesterday,' divined the constable.

‘I'll have you know, young man,' said Lisa Haines grandly, ‘that it's called “knock-on cookery”.'

‘Whatever it's called,' retorted Crosby, ‘everyone who's indoors has got to go to their rooms and stay there until we say so.'

‘That's as may be,' said the cook with spirit, ‘but I've got my ovens to see to. I'm not leaving them to go and twiddle my thumbs in some sitting room, not with those pies in them.'

‘I've come to guard the kitchen door, too,' said the constable. ‘No one's to go out of here. Not now we're in charge.'

Lisa Haines jerked her shoulder towards the window and said slyly, ‘What about coming in? All right to do that, is it?'

Detective Constable Crosby peered out at a majestic figure making her stately way through the kitchen garden. ‘Who's that?'

A small smile hovered round the corners of the cook's lips. ‘That's our Miss Bentley making sure nothing nasty's been going on under the gooseberry bushes. You'll enjoy her.'

Miss Bentley, leaning heavily on a stout walking stick, continued her progress, brown Oxford shoes and all, towards the kitchen door.

‘Really,' she exclaimed, stumping into the kitchen and plonking herself down on the nearest chair, ‘this place is getting worse than Nightmare Abbey. Whatever next?'

A grammatical purist might have wondered why Miss Bentley hadn't said ‘whoever' rather than ‘whatever' but the former headteacher belonged to the Superintendent Leeyes school of taking bad news as a personal affront rather than as an occasion for sympathy for the victim.

‘We'll be taking statements from everyone about when they last saw Mrs McBeath,' said Detective Constable Crosby, taking her question about ‘whatever next' literally.

‘It's when we next see her that matters,' snorted Miss Bentley, ‘if we do. Silly woman.' Like the Superntendent, she too went in for victim-blaming. ‘And how she is when we do find her … she could be anywhere in this rabbit warren of a place.'

‘Standard procedure,' riposted the constable, speaking the language of officialdom well on this – but not every – occasion.

Miss Bentley, who might have been expected to have been on the side of the angels in the matters of both procedure and officialdom, made an indeterminate sound of dissent. ‘That won't be the way to get at where she is, Constable.'

‘In the Force, madam,' declared Crosby sonorously, ‘we find truth will out. Even,' he added naively, ‘if it does take its time about it sometimes.'

‘Ah, yes.' Miss Bentley suddenly beamed her agreement with this sentiment. One of her standard end-of-term addresses to the girls who were leaving had taken as its text the aphorism ‘The truth may be blamed but it can never be shamed.' ‘But not that way.'

‘Tell me, what will be the way, then?' asked Crosby.

Miss Bentley didn't answer the question but gave it as her considered opinion that while she could think of no reason at all for Mrs McBeath to have come to any harm, she could think of one very good one for Miss Margot Ritchie meeting trouble instead.

Detective Constable Crosby sat down opposite her. ‘You can?' he said encouragingly.

‘I can.' Miss Bentley needed no encouraging. She had spent a lifetime pronouncing her strong views and having them treated with attention and respect. One of the many, many disappointments of retirement and old age had been that there were precious few people around now to listen to them.

Detective Constable Crosby leaned forward and made it very clear that he belonged to this small minority. ‘Tell me,' he said with patent interest.

Miss Bentley was only too willing to expound her theories. These revolved round the subject of Walter Bryant and his expected remarriage. She asked, ‘Well, wouldn't you prefer to live in a detached bungalow with a devoted wife and access to a motor vehicle instead of being permanently incarcerated in this benighted place?'

‘Yes,' said Crosby simply.

‘To say nothing of home comforts.' In the interests of her own future comfort Miss Bentley, no fool, decided against mentioning the delights of home cooking in the presence of Lisa Haines.

‘Very important,' agreed Crosby, who was too young even to envisage old age let alone its attendant shortcomings.

‘Take it from me,' she said darkly, ‘those daughters of his will do anything they can to prevent the marriage.' With a visible effort Miss Bentley struggled to her feet and sailed out of the kitchen in the direction of the downstairs cloakroom.

He had barely had time to put his notebook away before she was back again, stickless and more than a little breathless.

‘It's the Judge's coat,' she said dramatically. ‘It's been slashed to absolute ribbons!'

Chapter Sixteen

Upon Death's purple altar now

‘My old coat, you say? Really?' Two guileless blue eyes belonging to Judge Gillespie momentarily met those of Detective Inspector Sloan and then looked away. ‘How very strange.'